Ning raises $44mm Series C Round-- "we achieved product/market fit"

blog.pmarca.com

7 points·joshwa··5 comments

The original idea behind Ning was that they would give you these code snippets to build your own web 2.0 site. Then you could modify the code any way you wanted, and others could use your modifications. This was before they went the custom social network route.

$44M is a ridiculous amount of money, but there might be some potential if they want to get back to their original vision.

44 million isn't too ridiculous in terms of operations and hardware if they expect to scale up to something massive. What's truly ridiculous is the rumored 170 million pre money valuation, for a consumer service that's hovering at an Alexa ranking of around 3000.

To put it into perspective, Veoh, a top 100 video sharing site, was rumored to be valued at $50-70 million ... but they have their own unique problems.

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

Snore. A quick change to the data model of myspace or facebook and you'd have the same thing. Just default a subset of users to a given skin, tack on their own domain, myclub.facebook/myname, and you're done.

I second the thought that 44mm seems like a ridiculously large round of financing for what they are trying to do. How could they possibly justify raising that much? (I'm honestly very curious) They must have something big and different planned

If they want to let 10,000 people create their own Facebooks that are 1/10,000th the size they need as much money as Facebook to pay for it. That's the best justification I can think of anyway.

I'm just scared he said "staff up" since that always seems to mean hiring the worst kind of people. Anyone know if he's still writing any code at all these days?

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